All 24 Uses
trifle
in
The Sunlight Dialogues
(Auto-generated)
- He could quote things at great length (there was no way for them to know whether he was really quoting or inventing) and he had an uncanny ability to turn any trifling remark into an abstruse speculation wherein things that were plain as day to common sense became ominous, uncertain, and formidable, like buttresses of ruined cities discovered in deep shadow at the bottom of a blue inland sea.†
Chpt 2
- Trifling little thing you'd never think about twice, nine times out of ten.†
Chpt 2 *
- What the old man was unable to manage directly (and would not have wanted to manage anyhow, being a moral person) his ghost had managed indirectly: he tyrannized Hodge—if a thing so trifling was worth a big word like tyranny—through Millie his wife (or former wife), Will Jr, and Luke, his sons.†
Chpt 3
- But however unnecessary the thing might be, it was also inevitable: the trifling tyranny, again, of the Congressman's ghost.†
Chpt 3
- The words were trifling, absurd if one looked them over too closely.†
Chpt 3
- The question entered and left his mind in a single instant, no more than a trifling impulse of the blood, a question he would no more have asked if Will were there than he would pause now to consider it.†
Chpt 3
- So far he was only upset, he hadn't yet distorted the Indian boy's trifling betrayal of Luke's ridiculous faith into something cosmic, unavengeable except on his mother.†
Chpt 4
- He would think about it nights, and when he solved some trifling problem, he was radiant.†
Chpt 6
- In the hypothetical usual case he feels a certain trifling longing for experience with women he is not married to—because a wife is a great responsibility, and that very sense of liberation, escape from parents, norms, old chains, which made sex an adventure when he married his wife, has become for him now a jailhouse.†
Chpt 7
- It's a system which can only work when the total population is small, and the troubles are trifling.†
Chpt 7
- Almost casually he seized the few trifling Kleppmann stocks or accounts he could locate—here fifty dollars, there seventy—stocks and accounts left, as if with malicious scorn, to mock him.†
Chpt 8
- Only one trifling irregularity caught his eye, a paperback book on the kitchen table, Castro's Revolution.†
Chpt 10
- He was aware that all lines were sharper than usual this afternoon, that his eyes were curiously sensitive to trifling detail—dust specks in the air, the pages of the book on the desk beside the papers—and he was sensitive to smells as well.†
Chpt 14
- and she remembered years from some other life, far away and trivial and sweet as a fairytale, a young girl's sorrows over trifling things, a mother's sweet and touching madness, a sailorboy walking through a wood with her, holding her hand with a sweet and ridiculous tenderness, and they made pictures with stones and he talked of the weather and she said with, oh, infinite righteousness, that she did not believe in indiscriminate kissing (but she was going to have an operation, and afterward, who knew?†
Chpt 16
- She stood hour after hour, or hung limp from the binding ropes she could no longer feel, trying to think, remembering trifles of no sense or significance.†
Chpt 20trifles = things of small importance
- But now all that seemed trifling, a kind of delusion of grandeur.†
Chpt 23
- An absurd, trifling question, he might've thought if he stood outside it; but it was not trifling.†
Chpt 23
- An absurd, trifling question, he might've thought if he stood outside it; but it was not trifling.†
Chpt 23
- It was as large and self-contained as the death, and it was the walls of the room that opened out from their two solid figures, the walls of night that opened out around the barn, that was trifling.†
Chpt 23
- Clumly nodded, a trifle startled.†
Chpt 5
- Will Hodge Jr sat with the seat pushed back as far as it would go, fists squared on the steering wheel, shoulders and belly monumental, trousers drawn up a trifle to preserve the press, revealing lean bare shins as white as milk.†
Chpt 8
- A trifle!†
Chpt 9
- It was all exactly as people claimed—a trifle, a thing one could easily get used to, not at all the shocking and terrible sort of experience he had imagined.†
Chpt 14
- She thought sadly of her life, but the details were a trifle confused.†
Chpt 23
Definitions:
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(1)
(trifle as in: a trifling matter) something of small importance; or a small quantity
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(2)
(trifle with as in: trifle with her affections) to treat somebody or something thoughtlessly or without respect
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(3)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) A trifle can refer to a kind of dessert. In classic literature, trifling can be a synonym for small talk.